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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-03-20 Daily Xml
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First Nations Voice Elections

The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (Leader of the Opposition) (14:24): My questions are again to the minister in his capacity as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs on the state-based Voice elections. Does the minister concede that a low voter turnout may be due to the lack of promotion of the state-based Voice elections by the Malinauskas government, and can the minister outline the spend on the promotion of the state-based Voice election process itself, compared to the spend on the promotion of the passing of the legislation in February 2023?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (14:24): I thank the honourable member for her question. I don't have an exact breakdown of the amount that was spent on the information for informing people about the state-based Voice. I know the Electoral Commissioner did a very substantial amount of work, particularly in remote and regional South Australia, promoting and trying to build an understanding of the Voice elections that were coming up.

I know the honourable leader's colleagues asked a couple of questions about this yesterday, and we don't have final figures in terms of the number of people who have voted, but I have said in this chamber before, as I said yesterday, we are tempering our expectations on turnout due to a number of factors. One of them, as I outlined yesterday—and certainly speaking to a number of people in the Aboriginal community and their feedback, and I think the Electoral Commission and the Commissioner for First Nations Voice has got—is some level of fatigue after the referendum last year. I suspect it will impact on voter turnout.

It is also the case that this is the first time we have tried this particular sort of election in South Australia, and the only rough comparison we have were the ATSIC elections that were held in the 1990s—four ATSIC elections during the course of that decade, where turnout, as I think I mentioned yesterday, started at just over 2,000 votes in South Australia and went up to just over 2,500 votes in South Australia.

If we can get anywhere near what ATSIC was able to achieve in the 1990s, particularly coming so soon after the referendum, I think that would be a very good result, also noting, as we have before, the quite remarkable engagement in terms of nominations, with 113 nominations. Compared per capita to the nominations for the 47 lower house seats of state parliament, which saw Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people nominating in excess of 2,400 per cent greater than the 1.4-odd million South Australians who nominated for the available seats in the lower house in the South Australian parliament.

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